


Dioramas

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Darillium, F/M, Gen, Introspection, Lists, Platonic Romance, Singing Towers of Darillium, Slice of Life, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-23
Updated: 2016-09-23
Packaged: 2018-08-16 22:21:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8119720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: "On Darillium, living becomes a matter of bearing and ensuring continuity between one-way moments. They are tasked with watching and recording countdowns."Snapshots of Darillium and how they failed to capture time, places and mourning there.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A big thank you to [right_at_the_end](http://archiveofourown.org/users/right_at_the_end/pseuds/right_at_the_end) for beta'ing this come-back fic.
> 
> A diorama is "a model representing a scene with three-dimensional figures, either in miniature or as a large-scale museum exhibit" (Oxford Dictionaries)

On Earth, in modern French, a “lieu-dit” is a location without address, street or number. It’s a place, with a given name, only known locally. The name is a coordinate in itself.

On Darillium, for a night, there was a place only known as “the TARDIS”.

It was never in the same spot. At one time, it was between the third street and the light palace. It had been on the twelfth street in front of the cinema a day before. It was in the countryside, in the desert, in a pond. It often went back to Darillium’s biggest city; it often was two places at once; it often disappeared. It once was on the face of the left tower of Darillium, suspended in mid-air like a blue scar on the red rock.

On Darillium, for twenty-four years, the TARDIS took up residence, continuously.

 

*

 

The Doctor tends to a night garden on Darillium.

It’s a bone of contention with the TARDIS. She insisted on having it outside and taking it everywhere with them. He was against dragging around shrubs stuck to the side of his time travelling machine; it just didn’t look appropriate when he wanted to make a detour via the Royal Alcázar[1]. But River argued that the Doctor didn’t understand the physics allowing ground and flowers to travel through time and it did the trick: the TARDIS got her openwork fences and flower pots.

The Darillimi vegetal species are a funny lot, drinking moonlight and dews when it’s the only star available. As such, a night garden is superfluous. Gardeners on Darillium favour large specimens that take decades to grow, faithfully reflect the starlight and reveal their full colours in the sunlight.

The Doctor’s garden is a tight etching in moon and dew, flowers and twigs so thin the full daylight would bend around it. The people passing his garden both marvel at and mock his pale choice of flowers, but he very gently protests:

“She won’t see them in the daylight.”

 

*

 

The Darillimi have long lives. They are a people of belief and patience, one who trusts the sun to come out after a twenty-four-year night, one who runs on starlight across the dark and sleep through the scorching years of noon. Some travel during the darkest years of the night, but most of them rejoice in those retreated hours.

The dry mountains and vast stretch of rocks blink back at the stars. In the city, when the fog rises on Darillium, between the streetlamps and little shop signs, blocks of light shape space; lighthouses punctuate the roads that cross the arid plains; from the heights, towns have the semblance of patches of starry skies; the Towers pour their cold light onto the lands nearby. They never go out once the sun goes down.

Darillium is the brightest planet they know, built in masses of light that hang and hang and hang for hours, for days and years before daylight.

People have happy lives on Darillium. Their planet is resourceful and their lives slow. Their traditions are old and built upon, the origins and rules lost to time. The festivals and celebrations remain, more joyous and innocent than anything one could witness in this galaxy. Their prayers are for the travellers crossing the night and the harvests devouring the day. They don’t have gods. There is more light and darkness and rocks than there are people on Darillium. They found in the course of their long history that they never felt more alone than when they tried to give a human face to night.  

Darillium is the quietest place in the Universe when the last hours of a day die and the city will not be painted in that particular shade of blue for twenty-four years, and it’s the loudest when the first hints of pink shatter the endless night, line by line, edge by edge.

Time is long on Darillium.

 

*

 

The Doctor and River never fall into domesticity.

Boredom develops its habits, its little arrangements and anticipations, and they call it life on Darillium.

They cheat a lot. For croissants and pistols. For Kuala Lumpur and Akhaten. For Ben E. King and Boudicca. For love, for adventure, for playing death, again, continuously, voraciously. The TARDIS has never been more cooperative than when they are docked at Darillium. A wrong turn and they might lose an eternity trapped in one minute.

“Docked” doesn’t fit the shape of their experience on Darillium.

The renewed choice they make to remain.

The moment they break their stay before the end of the night, it will become something different from the singing towers of Darillium the Doctor has feared so much. An opportunity missed. A rehearsal. At any moment, they could stop this night from being the last night.

Or they could shorten it considerably and foolishly, because they don’t know any more when they are cheating time.

Sometimes the Doctor wonders if this is what living without a time machine feels like.

There is really no way to know if this is _it_.

Before, the singing towers of Darillium marked the end of the road, far, far ahead, and for him only. Now, they appear around the both of them, immutable and calm, as alarming as the blank page waiting for a dedication.

Excitement, there, develops a civilisation.

 

*

 

A photo is pinned on the TARDIS’ inside doors.

It’s a group shot taken by one of the friends they made around there, a professor at Darillium’s biggest university.

The picture shows River on the centre right, Eartha Kitt and Ibn Battuta[2].

in the middle, who have no idea they have been transported to another time and place, but are enjoying the party nevertheless, and various Darillimi artists from the current movement.

And friends.

Only the top of the Doctor’s head can be seen behind the towering heights of Mistress Nour. Mistress Nour had left quite an impression on the Doctor, and a greater one on River who almost made them her lover.

Jack is missing from the photo.

He had stepped in a back alley just minutes before with one of the waiters. He had found him charming and wanted to share a smoke. No innuendo; just a puff of those light, fruity glass cylinders they smoke in great numbers here and whose delicious perfume still hides noxious content.

That was Darillium; missed instants they could not save.

There were other pictures with Jack, sartorial ones with Eartha Kitt, plenty from other times, including a memorable shot taken during the flower Safari they undertook after the great storm in their eighth year. But no pictures with Ibn Battuta and Eartha Kitt, Mistress Nour and Mother Arav, Teir, Era, Simr and the desert boys, with musical names, garnet skins, impeccable suits loosened by alcohol and intimacy.

Only one photo of this instant exists and it’s on the TARDIS’ doors.

There was a time, a continuous string of seconds when their elderly neighbours were alive, when new flower arrangements would bloom at the window next to theirs, when they would toast over the common fence. But that time feels removed from the seconds they are living now.

The photo is a pocket universe they cannot enter from this side of life.

 

*

 

Outside of Darillium, the Doctor and River lived their lives with the knowledge that History was just that; life lived, processed. Enjoy, rewind, relive; they randomized emotions and engraved chance. Time was happening in-between. They were History.

On Darillium, living becomes a matter of bearing and ensuring continuity between one-way moments. They are tasked with watching and recording countdowns.

Minutes after minutes lost to inhabiting reality, years after years to maintaining the horizon.

Losing spaces becomes harder; the little café in one of the villages they dearly love and that will be replaced by a tattoo workshop. He has to restrain River from going back and escaping themselves to take a last sip.

She is used to haunting places, popping whenever she wants. Now places haunt her. She forgets she could take the same road every day to go from one place to another. Each day, the Doctor marvels at the different kitchen smells that invade their courtyard, wherever their courtyard is. Familiarity doesn’t seem so small now, it seems immense and obtuse. It reminds him of Trenzalore.

With urgency, they rush through museums for fear of seeing them close too soon. They spend a year, several times a month, going to the little creek behind the mountaineers’ cabin after they stumble upon it the first time; they are terrified of losing it in a sand storm. By chance, by accident, by time.

The Doctor dedicates her resting hours to calculating the probability for things happening. A project of building in front of their restaurant. A row with the local librarian. Wrong directions. Bad weather. Lost slippers. Sandstorms are the least of his worries. Suddenly, the weight of possibilities and their ineluctable outcome seems immense. Chance never seems crueller than in the common acts of their everyday life.

They create roads, paths built by their sole; twenty-four years of buying bread at the same shop and getting pastries from the Western kingdom at the edge of town.

The Doctor draws roads for her in the TARDIS as well. From the bedroom to the bathroom and from the kitchen to the library. River disrupts them constantly, blows holes in the corridors and sleeps out. She installs a patio at the back of the TARDIS and it becomes a much needed war room. He belligerently renames it the“peace room”.

Their bed, a fighting field, is small because she argues with his ship over the room they can set aside for sleep. It is always too much for River. It doesn’t matter. He learns silly things about her that he would never have had the patience to notice over the course of an adventure, and the pattern in her breathing as she sleeps is one of them.

Things happen in the periphery of their lives that tend to become a teaching subject.

They start an art movement –accidentally-, and a school of thoughts –deviously, as River needs playmates to wreak havoc.

They start a language made of their spats and nicknames.

They start a civilisation on Darillium: their friends accumulated over twenty-four years and their foes, their habits, his Gods, her blasphemy, their off-world excursions, their stories and lies. They would love to say they started History on Darillium and do their best to. Every kingdom needs its wars.

But Darillium remains an empty planet.

Absence is catching.

 

*

 

The Doctor understands something about the insolences River wrapped herself into during the years he knew and suspected her to be in prison: a prison is not defined by its walls and its potential for break-up. A prison is defined by the time it separates from you.

Being on Darillium for that night doesn’t require of them to be on Darillium on every night, as she never was in Stormcage for very long. But he feels every minute they spend on Darillium and every minute they spend away like a line carved on a wall and eating at it, relieving him of what they just left behind. It doesn’t matter if time is ticking away from a sentence or towards expiration. The instants between these two points, now and then, are marked, not belonging to them.

Twenty-four years when they belong to no one but each other, and those years aren’t theirs. Some are stolen, some are carried out; all of them owed.

 

*

 

You invent birthdays and holidays when you spend a life on a date. You end up with your own calendars, your own months and traditions.

First time they ordered take-out in what would become their favourite restaurant.

First time they had to register to the Darillimi nation because the Doctor was adamant they vote in the upcoming elections. In there, they were Pr. River Song and Dr. Basil Song, from Earth, 51st century. They never asked for River’s diploma.

First time a couple of tourists stopped their car in the middle of the street to ask them for directions.

First time they both burst into tears because after a while it was difficult never to wake up to the sun – the Darillimi people call it “afterimages” syndrome. They both experienced it the same night and felt a little less alone for it.

First time they were invited to a coming of age ceremony by one of their new friends.

First time they had to pay the equivalent of taxes on Darillium and the scene that followed the realisation the Doctor was completely penniless and that River was the only bread-winner. He corrected her with bread-stealer and had to sleep among the birds for a week.

First time they invented an excuse not to go to a wedding, a few months after the coming of age ceremony.

First time River and the Doctor sat down after having watched children playing outside and she dared to whisper “perhaps never”. That “perhaps” left the Doctor floating for days and enacting cruel assaults of hope on her.

It was a last time as well.

And the last time River overthrew a government - _promised -_ because its leader had crossed her.

Last time River dived into her past. She didn’t share with him any of her findings or trips. But as she needed him to silently hold her hand when she crashed on the sofa, he complied. Darillium gave her time without spoilers, at last, and enough to close the chapter.

Last time they went to the southern park before it was razed to the ground.

Last time the Doctor was a student at the Darillimi university. During the course of his eighth bachelor’s degree, someone decided to murder the dean, desert climatologists were framed, a flea circus got involved and things turned ugly after that. He never suspected academia could be so exhausting.

Last time they went on a hike with the owner of the cake store - she died a few months after in a sailing accident.

Last time they followed the rules about not going back on their trail, reliving, rewinding, enjoying. They loved too much during those twenty-four years to squander any time on safety, too intent on preserving their last night.

Last time they changed the TARDIS’s location on Darillium.

And all the last times they thought were the last and that got saved by life: last time they rode Shetland ponies on ice while chased by cave monsters; last time they repainted the TARDIS one day before the dawn; last time they met Cesaria Evora in a smoke-filled bar, last time they kissed.

There were times, so many, when they had a thought and pushed it back to later because for the first time, they had time, and lost it entirely, because it was never enough time anyway.

Days they had to celebrate only once and their continued presence on Darillium was actively preventing them from reliving it ever.

Last minute encounter and death of a new friend;

A certain kind of intimacy that left them terrified for a while;

Birth of the eleventh hour, halfway into the long night;

And moments, and moments, and moments, rigged like secrets, unspeakable like chance.

They were rubbish with calendars anyway.

They were part of the peoples’ story on Darillium. They could not skip or rewind, could merely run faster towards distraction. Time became a matter of distances covered.

 

*

 

It was good the sun never rose on Darillium for them. They would never confess to the linear years that were spent in the dark, in a blissful night that kept their secrets and ambiguity, in a shroud that lied through its teeth to get them to the next dawn-less day.

A time came when the roads paved and the red-letters sent led nowhere or got lost in the night; they had a shape and destination for as long as the Doctor and River were in their midst.

Friends of the Doctor and River’s;

Their favourite Darillimi curse word;

A hidden creek on the riverbank;

They would cease to exist outside their proximity. Countdown at an address unknown, record of hours in retrograde.

Night on Darillium, for all intents and purposes, becomes the moment everything that is not assaults them. And everything that is fades.

First and last date on Darillium. It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t painless. It was so many things as well, some very beautiful and some very bold.

But it wasn’t quick.

 

*

 

River would almost get them killed forty-four times a year on average. After a while they forgot to count the years and measured life in batches of forty-four near-death experiences.

They fell in love with the carnivorous flowers of Darillium, most of them with strict blooming cycles which became their months.

The Doctor had a habit of checking the bank every day, as he quickly discovered it was in fact the place most attacked by aliens since Earth, 21st century. The guard had a different morning drink every day and the Doctor never bothered to learn the proper days of the week on Darillium.

Their very first day on Darillium was entirely spent in the restaurant and its surrounding. Hours of the day followed the life of the restaurant from now on.

At Remi’s break.

Five minutes to garbage time.

Half past the third service.

River’s diary entries for those twenty-four years are confusing, even to her.

 

*

 

They are stuck under some awning in a part of town they don’t know, an urban feat considering the Doctor thought he had thoroughly explored every nook and cranny of this place four times. He is now convinced small towns are bigger than the TARDIS.

The sky is pouring.

For the first time in a very long time, he doesn’t get soaked under the rain trying to outrun the cataclysm. He tries to tell himself it’s because he doesn’t feel like getting wet today. But River is standing next to him, arms hanging by her sides. Her fingers are glistening with rain; she just raised a tentative hand from under their abode. She’s not talking to him, or even trying to engage with the passer-by trapped with them under a shared concern for their health and/or belongings.

Their realm is a patch of pavement lighter than everything else around them, save the sky. It’s smaller than everything he ever reigned upon and he has known prisons. But there was always something or someone outside, extending his grasp on liberty.

Across the square, some shadows are running, feet bare, towards them. Or maybe not. They sprint past them, crossing the shelter, leaving some wet imprints on the dry ground. Going home, catching a ship.

River watches them.

That’s the story River is providing as to why the Doctor is not getting soaking wet this time: he feels like losing time, as does she, and it’s not time _lost_.

Time here is not something he will try to encapsulate and preserve. It’s nothing, a scene he will eventually forget, because it closely resembles so many moments he experienced in the past, and did not experience, with River, without her. The scene will not provide enough peculiarities, no frame of reference, for him to distinguish it from a mere sensation either.

Not a moment, not even a memory.

Time is space; time is sensation; on Darillium, time is the opposite of what he has always felt it was.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [1] The Royal Alcázar of Madrid was a fortress turned palace, home to the Spanish Court until it was destroyed in 1734.
> 
> [2] Ibn Battuta was a well-travelled Moroccan Muslim scholar from the 14 th century.


End file.
